Featuring former members of Will Haven, The Abominable Iron Sloth and Ghostride, Armed For Apocalypse mix your run-of-the-mill Deathcore with heavy Sludge to create a fairly unique sound of their own. Think a much less technical Despised Icon jamming with Crowbar and you’ve got it, really; the riffs are bottom-heavy and reverberating, the vocals are tortured, the songs don’t so much bounce as they wobble. Unmistakeably heavy shit, then, but with an openly Hardcore attitude to annoy the purists – far more heavy than shit, however. The pummelling likes of Fists Of Gods are more Meshuggah than mosh, and whilst at times you do have to squint pretty hard to see past the ‘core-nyness, overall it comes out as something more worthwhile than the Hatebreed-CrowbarKingdom Of Sorrow thing, if anyone remembers that?

Where Defeat succeeds is when the slow heaviness is paramount. Closing seven-minuter You Are Alive When They Start To Eat You, for example, slow-burns like Cult Of Luna planning to commit a school shooting, turning towards ‘proper’ Doom in the second half of the song as things get really slow. It’s worth mentioning opening blast We Fell From The Bottom, too, the dark pounder genuinely trying to mix it up a little and keep your interest throughout the screeching and blasting. Elsewhere, however, things can get a little dull, although the Deathcore elements certainly help to keep things energetic. Hero Complex, for instance, opens relatively melodically before turning all mosh-happy, and whilst I can’t imagine anyone into Metalcore who hasn’t heard a track that sounds exactly like Torchlight Search For The Dead in the past six months, it isn’t at all bad. It’s getting harder and harder to define what essential music is in these modern times where every other band is a clone, and whatever Defeat is it isn’t essential – but it is good enough to provide a bit of headbanging for fans of the style. Knock yourselves out, guys.